Person

Abbé Prévost

Abbé Prévost was a French writer, translator, and cleric who brought unusual emotional force to stories of passion, moral failure, and self-destruction. In Manon Lescaut, he created two lovers whose relationship is written with urgency, tenderness, and no easy division between innocence and guilt. His work includes novels, memoir-like prose, translations, and large narrative cycles in which desire repeatedly collides with duty and social order. Prévost’s own life was nearly as unsettled as the lives of his characters: he moved between military service, religious life, flight, and years abroad. That restlessness may help explain why he wrote so convincingly about people who know what they ought to do — and still choose otherwise.